I am using the 32 bit variant of Porteus and using it inside Virtual Box, so the guest additions are needed.

The purpose is to have a small/light Linux 32 bits virtual machine with dev tools for programming students. The combination of Porteus with Virtual Box results in something very easy to install in different operative systems, and then the students save their work on a VBox shared folder, as the VM has no hard disks, just the iso for booting Porteus. If they do something weird, the next reboot gives them a clean working Porteus platform.

I've been using Porteus v3.2.2 32 bit with Cinnamon on a daily for about a year now, on an external HDD. Now that v4 is out, I tried to install it to another HDD to see if it's reliable, I ended up with the following:

- As soon as it booted(Graphics Mode), I was met with a login screen that was not in the older version. Upon inserting "guest" as both user and password, the system gave a few errors(1 frame, sometimes just a black screen) and went back to the same screen(this will happen no matter how many times I try it). Upon inserting "root" as user and "toor" as password, the system loaded up cinnamon, however, this gave me the next problem.

- With the root user, connection to the internet is not possible, when attempted with cable it keeps trying to connect without success(this only happens at work networks, presumably because it needs specific settings, my home network works fine, but only via ethernet), with any WiFi USB adapters, it refuses to even check for networks and just reads "unavailable". It should be noted that in "Always Fresh" everything works and in v3.2.2 all of the connections mentioned work.

- Since the guest account did not work, I tried to create a new one other than root, however, the option "Users and Groups" in the cinnamon settings is not functional (every other option works, this one simply does not respond). I then successfully created a user via terminal (adduser command), but when trying to log in, did the same as guest account

-Something less important: upon clicking the "Quit"(shutdown) button in the menu, the window that pops up saying "Shut down this system now?" only has one option, "Cancel". Pressing the physical power button on the computer works.

The only changes that were made to the system after installing were the installation of chromium, which works well but has to be lanched with --no-sandbox as I am stuck as root
Sorry for the long post and I apologize if I'm missing something obvious, I'm gonna try to reinstall porteus v4 with MATE and see if any of the problems go away/persist

Binary Enigma, thank you for your report. Could you tell us a little more on what an install to HDD means? Is it what is called as a "frugal" install of porteus? Also, please try in always fresh mode to see if the same problem occurs.

Are you able to login as guest from a VT? (Ctrl-Alt-F2). If yes, could you provide the output of the following commands:

Tried some different variants, and all the x86_64 give me 4.15.2-porteus, but all the i586 variants give me 4.15.0-rc7-porteus.

confirmed
it would appear that a mistake has been made building the i586 ISOs ie. they have the wrong kernel/vmlinuz(4.15.0-rc7)
@paf , if you able, a workaround would be to remake the ISOs, swapping out the /porteus/base/000-kernel.xzm and /boot/syslinux/vmlinuz with the ones from:
<mirror dir>/i586/Porteus-v4.0/kernel/linux-4.15.2/
@brokenman, guess what your job for this weekend is (note: x86_64 isos are correct)

Tried some different variants, and all the x86_64 give me 4.15.2-porteus, but all the i586 variants give me 4.15.0-rc7-porteus.

confirmed
it would appear that a mistake has been made building the i586 ISOs ie. they have the wrong kernel/vmlinuz(4.15.0-rc7)
@paf , if you able, a workaround would be to remake the ISOs, swapping out the /porteus/base/000-kernel.xzm and /boot/syslinux/vmlinuz with the ones from:
<mirror dir>/i586/Porteus-v4.0/kernel/linux-4.15.2/
@brokenman, guess what your job for this weekend is (note: x86_64 isos are correct)

YES, YES, YES !

Now, after doing that almost everything is ok.

When doing name -a (on i586) the correct version is shown, but strangely the command complains that the local timezone is not set.
Now, the failure when building the Vbox guest additions is different.

It still complains that the Kernel configuration is invalid, it cannot find include/generated/autoconf.h or include/config/auto.conf and tells me to
run

Could you tell us a little more on what an install to HDD means? Is it what is called as a "frugal" install of porteus?

I feel kinda dumb because I didn't know what you mean by frugal, and, after looking it up I am still not sure, but what I did was: Created an ext4 partition (Not sure if it matters but there's another partition first, exFat), extracted files from Porteus-CINNAMON-v4.0rc4-i586.iso into the root of said partition, ran Porteus-installer-for-Linux.com(had to change perms to executable first, which wasn't needed when I did the same for v3.2.2), then I just went to check if porteus.cfg was correct, it wasn't(at least in relation to v3.2.2), just changed "APPEND changes=/porteus" to "APPEND changes=/changes" (Which I believe was default in v3.2.2, if it wasn't, it was what I have in my working copy of it). After that, just restarted and booted from it, to find the previously reported problems.
In hindsight, it appears I probably installed it wrong, considering what I found when trying to figure out what you meant by frugal:
"Porteus can be installed to hard drives, but it should be left in its compressed state (otherwise known as a 'Frugal' installation). Installing extracted files to a hard drive is not supported" - although it worked perfectly for my copy of Porteus v3.2.2
I apologize for being quite noobish at this stuff, I kinda just use porteus as one would use a portable version of Windows, I like porteus because it's portable, fast on old machines(which is, unfortunately, all I use) and it gave me no problems(In v3.2.2, that is); I don't use it for anything too technical.
In relation to using VT, I already formatted the partition with porteus in it, to reinstall(since it seems I installed it wrong, I'd appreciate some info on how to do it right), if the problems then persist, I shall test some other things and report my findings then.